Podcast Tuesday: "Jumping the Nun"

Diane Adair (aka Diane Diefendorf) and Henry Winkler on Happy Days.

Nuns were weirdly popular in the 1960s. Cheerful, fun-loving nuns, that is. (Dour, punishment-inflicting nuns apparently had the decade off.) One of the biggest films of the era was The Sound of Music (1965), the tuneful story of a manic pixie dream nun, Maria (Julie Andrews), who leaves her convent to work for a stern, widowed Austrian baron (Christopher Plummer) as a nanny to his seven rambunctious children. In short order, with some help from a score by Rogers & Hammerstein, Maria wins over the children and then their father, teaching them how to enjoy both life and music.

"The $ound of Money" (MAD, 1967)

And this was just one example of the nunsploitation trend! On TV, there was Sally Field in The Flying Nun (1967-70), a gimmicky sitcom about a petite nun whose habit allows her to become airborne for short periods of time. And on the pop charts, there was "Dominique," a French-language novelty song by Sœur Sourire aka The Singing Nun. With its catchy melody, it became a widely-loved #1 smash hit in 1963, but the authors of The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste (1990) maintain that "Dominique" forever robbed nuns of their dignity and mystique. They write of the song: "It was a pop music phenomenon, and it toppled nuns from their pedestal. Suddenly the world was faced with an epidemic of kooky, perky, goofy nunnish antics."

MAD tackled this very phenomenon when they parodied The Sound of Music as "The $ound of Money" in 1967 with art by Mort Drucker and a script by Stan Hart. That marvelous satire includes spoofs of many of the songs from the film, including "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" MAD's version was called "How Do You Solve the Problem of Religion?" and it went (in part) like this:

How do you solve the problem of religion?

How do you handle nuns and not offend?

Just simply have them doing things they wouldn't!

Don't follow the norm,

Or stay true to form.

Pretend!

Just show a kooky nun who rides a scooter.

Or show a Sister try to fly a kite.

The movies can make folks feel

That all these events are real,

And being a nun is fun from morn 'til night!

People will eat up films about religion!

Just keep them corny, saccharin and trite!

The ninth season of Happy Days takes place in 1963, the year of "Dominique," so it's only natural that they'd have their own take on the nunsploitation genre. Their version was called "No, Thank You" or "The Nun's Story." The plot has a young nun named Gloria (Diane Adair) teaching history at Jefferson High. Not knowing his new colleague is a bride of Christ, Fonzie (Henry Winkler) pursues her romantically (without success) and even forces a kiss on her. Naturally, when he learns the truth, Fonzie is eaten up with guilt. But Gloria is one of those happy-go-lucky, non-judgmental '60s pop culture nuns, so she's not mad at all. The episode ends with Gloria knocking Fonzie into the water at a carnival dunk tank, a scene that reminded me very much of the MAD song about "the problem of religion."

But how is the episode overall? Find out by listening to the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast.